DEVASTATED FRANCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18446, 6 January 1922, Page 10

DEVASTATED FRANCE

- KIPLI.NG GOES AND SEES IT. Mr Rudyard Kipling, in a letter to a French friend, an extract from which appears in, the Matin, describes the “long horror” of a visit to the devastated regions of Northern France, which came just after a visit to the Rhine. On the Rhine Mr Kipling had found a “countryside intact, full of women, children, and cattle, with fields cultivated right up to the edge of the road, smoking factory chimneys, and on all sides loaded goods trains,” a country untouched by the ravages of war. in fact. In Prance there was everywhere desolation, and everywhere there were shell-holes. “When one thinks that there is not a single shell-hole on the land of the Huns,” says Mr Kipling, “one feels that soon (if He has not already begun) the Almighty will concern Himself with a world which has refused justice* to the world. Can one bo astonished when such an iniquity has been accepted that all the forces of evil under the sun unite to say that there is no justice in Heaven to feat?” —A Half-dead City.— Mr Kipling describes his first night at Verdun in a hotel in the course of reconstruction, with its atmosphere of fallen plaster and fresh paint. In the “terrible silence of a half-dead city” the noise of the wreckage of a ruined house opposite, swinging backwards and forwards, and then toppling and crumbling, could be heard, and—, “then a fine dust of earth and limestone filled our room. And somehow this dull, rumbling noise (and this odour) made us realise more than the sights of the day had been able to do the horror ' of the years behind and to come. “Again, at Rheiriis. in# the middle of the night,” Mr Kipling goes on, “wo heard that noise (a crossbar of broken iron in a wall twisted bv fire), and again we smelt that odour. To think that a whole living country like this has gone for years already with this odour in its nostrils! A'fine dust also filled our hair and mixed with what we ate —not fresh, clean dust, but that fine intimate dust that can only come from houses that have been long inhabited. In the open country, even at Vanx and the Mort Homme, Nature is at work trying to restore herself, .and with time that will bo accomplished. But in the towns, which are the work of man, man has to do his repairs alone, and the ruins of smitten houses fall and lie round him like a flock smitten with plague.” —Tiro Soul of a Land. — “Shakespeare was right. To replace the • dead who lie upon battlefields costs only the pain of birth (this is why the dea- Stire so often and remain unavenged). But the material works of man, the works of long, hard labour by

which, and in which, his soul lives, are not bo easily rebuilt, and when they go his heart goes with them. What-will ho the soul of a land which has to bring up its children with such souvenirs and in such scenes? We are not yet at the beginning of the evils which will issue from this denial of justice. And when the evils are there our wise philosophers will aak, What is the cause?” Mr Kipling gives a vivid little sketch of an old countrywoman wandering about in the “immense devastation’' and striking to right and left of her with a rake, like a blind woman. He asked his guide, an Alsatian General, which she was doing, and the General replied, “I think 1 she_ is looking for something that she buried before the war. I have often seen that.”

Although he had passed a whole day among the “works of death,” Mr Kipling says:—“This little silhouette, wandering across that broken, churned-up valley, turning her head from one side to ,tho other like an ant, was more frightful than all I had seen during the day. —They Must See It.—

In conclusion, Mr Kipling declares that he finds it

“almost impossible to, give a complete impression of the reality to people to whom life, experience, and* tradition have given no scale by which- to measure it. They must cross the sea and see with' their 'own eyes, and I am glad to bo able to say that the people who go to see are more and more numerous. It is one thing to see the assassin before the tribunal, and it is another to see the body of the victim. ... If only we could make an alliance with France—and I am convinced that at the bottom of their hearts that is the desire of our people—we might still be satisfied.”